When I started writing this column back in 1992, the world of personal technology was positively primitive compared with where we stand today. So armed with the benefit of 15 years of hindsight, and in this final installment of the Mossberg Report, I’d like to take a look back on the distance we’ve traveled in [...]
Apple’s iPod music players are wildly popular, and they’re paired with a very good online music service, the iTunes Store. But not everyone loves the famous gadget. Here’s a guide to doing digital music outside the Apple hegemony.
Music services
The iTunes Store is the digital equivalent of a music shop. You buy individual songs or albums [...]
You can’t turn around without reading scary stories about the dangers of the Internet — spyware, adware, viruses, spam. But the biggest trend to worry about is the combining of these nefarious tools for criminal purposes. Spam email used to be annoying; now it may lead you to phony web sites set up by identity [...]
Recently, the Palm Treo has been the product of choice in high-end smart phones. The Treo can not only make phone calls, but also send and receive e-mail, surf the Web, play music, take pictures and handle Microsoft Office documents, with the aid of a small built-in keyboard. The latest Treo 700 models are more [...]
It used to be that if you switched from a PC running the Windows operating system to the small-selling but elegant Macintosh, you had to leave behind your Windows programs. Sure, there was one software product that allowed you to run Windows on a Mac and thus run Windows programs. But it was so slow [...]
The release of a new version of Microsoft Windows is like the launching of a new aircraft carrier. It’s a major, ponderous event whose ripples affect everything around it. So Microsoft’s planned launch of the next version of its Windows operating system, called Windows Vista, currently set for January 2007, will be a big deal.
Vista [...]
When the vast majority of the world’s PC users want to surf the Web, they fire up Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, the free browser that comes included with Windows, now in version 6.0. They may not even know its name, since it’s usually the only, or at least the preset default, choice for browsing on a [...]
As smart phones and personal digital assistants become more like little computers, they have begun to compete with laptops as portable digital workstations. For short or light-duty business trips, you can now leave the laptop at home and rely instead on a smart phone with a keyboard, such as a BlackBerry phone from Research in [...]
Apple’s Macintosh computers claim only a tiny share of the overall PC market, but they are getting more consideration from Windows users thinking of switching than at any time in many years.
The daunting security problems that have plagued Windows have also prompted many of its users to take a serious look at the Mac. This [...]
When you think of legal music downloading on the Internet, you naturally think of Apple Computer’s iTunes Music Store. The first successful legal music service to offer the catalogs of the major labels, iTunes has roughly an 80 percent share of the legal market, according to Apple. It offers 1.5 million tunes, about 50 percent [...]
The graphical user interface has been a success in the mass market since the Apple Macintosh debuted in 1984, and it has dominated computing since Microsoft Windows went mainstream around 1990.
Its visual display of files stored in a nested hierarchy of folders has worked pretty well — until recently.
In the past few years, computer hard [...]
Edited by Walt and written by Katie Boehret, this is a guide to gadgets, web services and other consumer technologies.
Ethics Statement
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.